For those who aren’t familiar with the plot of The Martian, an astronaut (Mark Whatney) gets stranded on Mars due to events that aren’t relevant here. Realizing that the nearest chance of rescue is four years away, and he has limited water, food, and oxygen, he devises a heroic plan to grow food and manufacture his own water and oxygen from what supplies he has around.
I’d have said “Fuck it” and made peace with it, then pulled a switch somewhere. But that’s why I’m not an astronaut.
If Whatney had done the same (and there would have been no book or movie), what could he have done? Best I can figure he could have sat in his suit, used up his oxygen, and probably passed out after a period of time. Minutes later he’d be dead. OR, he could have died horribly in agony as he gasped for breath; I’m not really clear on the mechanics of suffocation.
At one point in the movie, he crushes up a narcotic painkiller. Would the amount of medicine rations sent up there been enough to kill him more-or-less quickly and painlessly, had he swallowed them all at once? Or would they have just made him die horribly (if at all)?
What about if he had just stepped outside without his suit? Would the change in pressure and temperature killed him instantly?
The way you’ve described would be an agonizing way to go. The CO2 would build up rapidly, and you would very much feel that you had no air. OTOH there’s a better way to go… he could change his air mix from 80% nitrogen to 100% nitrogen. Dying from lack of oxygen is much more peaceful than suffocating yourself.
Carbon dioxide is what causes the suffering in suffocation. IIRC at one point he uses the atmosphere controls to pull out all the oxygen, leaving mostly nitrogen, while wearing an oxygen mask to breathe. Same trick without the mask should provide a quick painless death.
The minimal lethal dose I’m seeing for Morphine is 200 mg—however, a Mars mission with a larger crew, and intended for longer duration, might have a larger stockpile of drugs to work with.
Or, you could just get yourself high as a kite and slit your wrists.
Per the book he seemed to have extensive medical supplies and some training so an overdose seems quite doable.
Also (in the book) there were several instances of him using the air recycling system to manipulate gas mixtures and moisture levels. The nitrogen asphyxiation (or CO) would probably be doable.
This is what he planned to do if the hookup failed and he ended up stranded. His preferred failure scenario, though, would be for the MAV to go kaboom (in which case he’d never know it).
Not instantly, no. Several agonising minutes, probably.
Of course, in that particular Mars base, there’d be all sorts of other creative ways he could take himself out - Auto-electrocution. Radiation poisoning. Make some propellant with the chemicals on-hand and fashion a suicide zip-gun. Hell, I’m sure it’s even possible to make a very sharp auto-guillotine in the machine shop. Do a Thelma-and-Louise in the Rover off the side of Valles Marineris (I know the site is quite a ways off from the canyon…)
I wouldn’t trust a movie with 3-boobed hookers for scientific accuracy.
Mars does have an atmosphere, but it’s so thin compared to Earth’s atmosphere that as far as we humans are concerned, it’s pretty close to a vacuum. It’s something like 1 percent the thickness of Earth’s atmosphere, IIRC.
In the 1960s, a guy named Jim LeBlanc was testing out stuff in a NASA vacuum chamber when the hose to his suit failed. His blood went through his lungs and picked up no oxygen (because no air, of course) and when that un-oxygenated blood reached his brain, he passed out. That took about 15 seconds. He said that the last thing he remembered before passing out was the saliva on his tongue boiling off due to the near vacuum. The chamber normally took about half an hour to re-pressurize, but they managed to get it back up to a normal pressure and opened it in a bit over a minute. LeBlanc complained of an earache afterward, but other than that he didn’t suffer from any ill effects.
It was nothing like Total Recall.
Judging from LeBlanc’s experience, I’d say more like 15 to 20 seconds of useful consciousness at best.
Towards the end of the film they showed some self exploding windows on a craft…made me wonder if all space craft have explosive windows in their designs…so he could strap himself with those explosives and meet 72 virgins.
Oh, come on now. The whole point of that book and movie was that not dying was damn near impossible. He wouldn’t have had to commit suicide, he’d have just had to stop trying so hard to live!
Not radiation poisoning. Not that you can’t do it. Though not sure what he would have available would be enough.
But for most levels of practical/doable radiation poisoning you’ll be wishing you were dead for a long time before you actually are. Probably about as pleasant as using a blowtorch to burn all your body skin then waiting to die from the after effects.
Just read the book, and while this isn’t a big plot point, one of the things that came up explicitly a couple of times is that Watney had more than enough morphine on hand for a lethal overdose if it came down to certain starvation.
Outside of that, Nefario’s on the right track- Watney also mentions at some point the possibility of manipulating the oxygen level and continuing the removal of carbon dioxide- he’d essentially just get sleepy, pass out and die of anoxia, since the carbon dioxide level is what your body reacts to when you suffocate, not lack of oxygen. Which is also why inert gas asphyxiation is a suggested execution method, it just so happens.
They’d have no chance to send him suicide pills- if they could get that there, they could send him food just as easily. He’d have to do himself in with the materials on hand.
I know this is fantasy/fan fiction of fantasy, but some comments are based on real(ish) world possibilities.
Suicide pills? A future NASA supply?
Ok, maybe if they suspected an astronaut might be cocooned yet still alive acting as a host for a creature feeding off his entrails before exploding from his chest, and each and everyone of them would beg piteously “kill me” if they see another human. Then I can see them coming in handy.
Painless:
put suit on. Step outside. Use a sharp object to create a pinhole leak in the suit that allows the pressure inside the suit to fall very slowly. This will give time for you to equalize the pressure in your ears as the pressure falls, so you don’t experience any earache. At some point the pressure will be too low to oxygenate your blood, and you will become dizzy and then unconscious; the pressure will continue to fall, and you’ll die.
No excessive CO2 buildup during this time, so no sense of “air hunger”. Ideally your last moments of consciousness will be in a state of stupefaction that makes it difficult to understand what’s happening. For reference, see videos of altitude chamber training in which test subjects become dim-witted after a couple of minutes at simulated high altitude. In some cases they can’t even follow the instructions to put their own oxygen mask back on, requiring an instructor to do it for them (sometimes after they’ve passed out).
